Top 140 Stieg Larsson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It was completely impossible to box with her. She had only one style, which we called Terminator Mode. She would try to nail her opponent, and it didn’t matter if it was just a warm-up of friendly sparring.”

— Stieg Larsson

102. “Capitalists’ wet dreams is to be involved in charity.”

— Stieg Larsson

103. “Mimi was massaging Salander’s back and neck. She had been kneading intently for 20 minutes while Salander mainly enjoyed herself and uttered an occasional groan of pleasure. A massage from Mimi was a fantastic experience, and she felt like a kitten who just wanted to purr and wave its paws around.”

— Stieg Larsson

104. “How could you be so idiotic as to decide to begin liquidating individuals in Sweden just as we saw happen in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship?”

— Stieg Larsson

105. “Stark raving mad.”

— Stieg Larsson

106. “Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.”

— Stieg Larsson

107. “Files are one thing. People are something else.”

— Stieg Larsson

108. “Blomkvist had to tell the story from beginning to end. A couple of times Henrik interrupted with a question or asked him to repeat something. Frode said not a word. When the story was done, Henrik.”

— Stieg Larsson

109. “I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.”

— Stieg Larsson

110. “It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.”

— Stieg Larsson

111. “She had put on make-up in a colour scheme that indicated she might be colourblind.”

— Stieg Larsson

112. “She still weighed only forty kilos and stood one metre twenty-four centimetres tall.”

— Stieg Larsson

113. “Too many cooks might wreck the whole dish.”

— Stieg Larsson

114. “At some point on the morning of the second day she came to a terrifying realisation. She had no idea how it had happened or how she was supposed to cope with it. She was in love for the first time in her life.”

— Stieg Larsson

115. “The desk was orderly, only a few paper in one heap. At its edge was a silver-framed photograph of a dark-haired girl, beautiful but with a mischievous look; a young woman on her way to becoming dangerous, he thought.”

— Stieg Larsson

116. “In this candid and rounded memoir, Baksi answers the questions a multitude of Larsson’s fans have already asked about his upbringing; the recurring death threats; his insomnia and his vices; his feminism.”

— Stieg Larsson

117. “The media have the ability to attract the craziest people to call in perfectly absurd tips. Every newsroom in the world gets updates from UFOlogists, graphologists, scientologists, paranoiacs, and every sort of conspiracy theorist.”

— Stieg Larsson

118. “Thinking about her mother always pitched Salander into a mood of helplessness and darkness black as night. As a teenager, she had cherished the fantasy that her mother would get well and that they would be able to form some sort of relationship. That was her heart thinking. Her head knew that it would never happen.”

— Stieg Larsson

119. “When he ran into her at Susanne’s, she was friendly but cool and distant. When they met in her bedroom, she was wildly passionate.”

— Stieg Larsson

120. “The NSA had enormous resources and used a vast network in order to capture a large number of mobile conversations in a certain region simultaneously. Each individual call was separated and processed digitally by computers programmed to react to certain words, such as terrorist or Kalashnikov. If such a word occurred, the computer automatically sent an alarm, which meant that some operator would go in manually and listen to the conversation to decide whether it was of interest or not.”

— Stieg Larsson

121. “Greeks who coined the term “Amazon.” The word literally means “without breast.” It is said that in order to facilitate the drawing of a bow, the female’s right breast was removed, either in early childhood or with a red-hot iron after she became an adult.”

— Stieg Larsson

122. “She felt high, as if she had consumed some inappropriate and presumably illegal substance. She focused her gaze on the street lamp outside the window and sat still while her brain worked at top speed.”

— Stieg Larsson

123. “To rest. Not to wakeup. Forgive me, Mimmi.”

— Stieg Larsson

124. “Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.”

— Stieg Larsson

125. “He sat still for almost ten minutes before he heard movement in the corridor and was aware that the police had arrived. By now he was not thinking of anything in particular. Then he raised the revolver one last time, held it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger.”

— Stieg Larsson

126. “Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn’t primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.”

— Stieg Larsson

127. “She was surprised to be alive. Yet she felt indifferent. If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about.”

— Stieg Larsson

128. “You mean that your buddy was lying?”

— Stieg Larsson

129. “That’s the crux of almost every fight, the moment when the strength drains out of you and the adrenaline pumps so hard that it becomes a burden and surrender appears like a ghost at ringside.”

— Stieg Larsson

130. “When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient.”

— Stieg Larsson

131. “No matter how hard she tried to concentrate on something else- pass the time and to distract her situation she was in- The fear came trickling out. It however like a cloud of gas around her threatening to penetrate her pores and poison her. She had discovered that the most affective way of keeping the fear of day was to fantasize that something that gave her a feeling of strength. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of gasoline.”

— Stieg Larsson

132. “I can still remember the unexpectedness of The Girl with the Dragon.”

— Stieg Larsson

133. “In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.”

— Stieg Larsson

134. “Blomkvist had often wondered whether it were possible to be more possessed by desire for any other woman. The fact was that they functioned well together, and they had a connection as addictive as heroin... sometimes weeks and months would go by before they saw each other. But even as alcoholics are drawn to the state liquor store after a stint on the wagon, they always came back to each other.”

— Stieg Larsson

135. “Every year Swedish society produces a new generation of threatened women who can testify to the lack of legal rights and the lukewarm interest shown by the police and other authorities.”

— Stieg Larsson

136. “Her apartment in Stockholm might look as if a bomb had gone off in it, but mentally Salander was extremely well organised.”

— Stieg Larsson

137. “Lie rather still because this is the first time I’ve used this equipment.”

— Stieg Larsson

138. “Cortez looked like someone newly in love, the way only twenty-four-year-olds can look.”

— Stieg Larsson

139. “But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows.”

— Stieg Larsson

140. “And yet it was her life that was going to be turned inside out. She would be forced to explain herself and to beg for forgiveness because she had defended herself.”

— Stieg Larsson

141. “I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.”

— Stieg Larsson

142. “The equation was simple. A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time. A slum landlord who forces young people to pay through the nose and under the table for a one-room apartment with shared toilet should be hung out to dry.”

— Stieg Larsson

143. “The older I get, the more I think it’s like a game of roulette. I don’t believe we’ll ever figure out precisely how the brain works.”

— Stieg Larsson

144. “He did not for a second doubt that Salander was mentally ill and capable of killing.”

— Stieg Larsson

145. “On his way home to Katarina Bangata, Bublanski felt an.”

— Stieg Larsson